Julie Overgaard, the executive director of South Dakota’s biggest public broadcaster, breathed a sigh of relief in the winter after the state legislature defeated a measure to cut half of her funding.
Then the real battle began.
Ms. Overgaard, 57, is one of dozens of public media executives across the United States bracing for the strong possibility that Congress will vote this week to eliminate funding for public radio and TV stations. The change would have wide-ranging effects on local broadcasters like hers.
“I can’t say that we would be dead immediately, but it would obviously have serious negative impacts,” Ms. Overgaard said.
Congress is expected to vote by the deadline on Friday on a White House proposal, known as a rescission package. It would pull back more than $500 million per year in federal funding that is set to go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed company that supports public radio and TV stations across the country. Last week, President Trump urged legislators to support the cuts, and threatened to withhold his support for any Republican lawmakers who oppose the proposal.
If the package passes, the federal funding for public media will dry up beginning in October. NPR and PBS would survive — they get a small percentage of their funding from the federal government. But the cuts would force many local stations to sharply reduce their programming and operations. Many public broadcasters receive more than 50 percent of their budgets from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The cuts could even be a death sentence for some stations, which have survived several attempts to choke off funding over the decades.
Several smaller stations in Alaska, which receive up to 95 percent of their funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, will probably go dark this fall if the proposal passes, said Ed Ulman, the president and chief executive of Alaska Public Media, the state’s largest PBS and NPR organization. Mr. Ulman said the network has gamed out the effects of the cuts as part of an effort to plead its case to the state’s representatives in Washington.
News and cultural programming aren’t the only things that would be affected, Mr. Ulman said. One of the first things to disappear would be a learning program created in partnership with local public schools based on the shows “Molly of Denali” and “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”
“We’ve already been very frank that if we were fully defunded by this rescission, all of those education activities, which are year-round, would be cut,” Mr. Ulman said.
Local shows would also probably be on the chopping block. While some of South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s budget pays for shows from PBS and NPR, much of it goes to local programming, including interviews with state lawmakers, documentaries about South Dakota’s history and coverage of high school sports, Ms. Overgaard said. Those programs are subsidized by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“Creating your own local content costs a lot more money than purchasing the national schedule does,” she said.
PBS and NPR would also have to make changes. Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, told employees last month that while the organization was doing everything it could to avoid layoffs, staff cuts were a possibility. Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, said in an interview that the impact on PBS would be “significant.”
“Once we know exactly what we have, then it’ll be a little clearer exactly what the path will need to be,” Ms. Kerger said. “I am very much hoping we don’t have to go down that path.”
As public broadcasters brace for the worst, some are still hopeful that philanthropists will help save many local radio and TV stations.
Marc Hand, the founder and chief executive of the Public Media Venture Group, said that foundations could finance the acquisition of local stations to keep them from disappearing, the way foundations have bought newspapers that were in danger of going out of business.
But those philanthropists could also be up against investors who are interested in acquiring those stations for their valuable broadcast spectrum, Mr. Hand said. They would include deep-pocketed private buyers who have large sums of money to hold the stations for future television spectrum auctions.
“Doing it one by one is harder when you’re going to be competing against people that are going to take a national approach to it,” he said.
The disappearance of U.S. public TV and radio stations would result in the elimination of local newsrooms that would probably not be replaced in the short-term, said Neal Zuckerman, a managing director at the Boston Consulting Group who published a research paper on the economics of local media.
It would cost roughly $1 billion annually to fund significant journalism across the United States, requiring an endowment of $20 billion to be sustainable, he said.
“These are essential services,” Mr. Zuckerman said. “If the federal government isn’t a viable source of funding for the health of our local communities, we need a fiscally sustainable solution.”
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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